Guatemala’s Paiz art biennial examines the power and limits of language in the fight against violence

At the heart of the XXIII Paiz Art Biennial in Guatemala is the question of how language manifests itself physically in our body and on the environment. Title Bebí palabras sumergidas en sueños (I drank words immersed in dreams), the 23rd edition of the biennale, which presents itself as the largest exhibition of contemporary art in Central America, brings together 30 artists and collectives who explore the ideas of translation and interpretation – of dreams, territories, bodies and movement. Its title comes from a line in Nací mujer (I was born a woman)a poem by Guatemalan writer Maya Cú.

The exhibition is a feminist and intersectional project, bringing to the fore the relationship between vulnerable and often marginalized bodies and the earth. Many works link language, race and class through different periods of forced migration due to slavery, attacks on indigenous communities and shifting land claims. Beyond artistic and theoretical examinations of these forms of violence, several works offer practical strategies for healing the trauma caused by gender-based violence and ecological extraction.

The biennial takes place in Guatemala City and Antigua and spans five sites: Centro Cultural de España, Centro Cultural Municipal Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen, Portal de la Sexta, Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española and La Nueva Fábrica. For its co-organizers, the independent curators Francine Birbragher-Rozencwaig and Juan Canela, the exhibition is an opportunity to present a “polyphony of voices”, an approach illustrated by a collaboration with the educator Esperanza de León to organize a cultural consultation meeting on the exhibition. This cohort is entirely made up of artists – Minia Biabiany, Marilyn Boror Bor, Duen Neka’hen Sacchi and Juana Valdés – whose works are also presented in the exhibition. The work of indigenous collectives, artists selected from a call for applications and five historical women artists – Margarita Azurdia, Ana MendietaFina Miralles, Maria Thereza Negreiros and Cecilia Vicuna— are also included.

These five works by historic groundbreaking artists of the 1960s and 1970s opened up new avenues for feminist reflection on bodies and ecologies, providing elements of a conceptual framework for the entire biennale. At a time when predominantly white male Land artists were gaining notoriety for large-scale and permanent interventions in the landscape, these artists took a specifically feminine and personal approach. In the series of photographs The tree (1975), Miralles, a Spanish conceptual artist, immerses his body in the soil of his native Catalonia to poetically underline the link between man and the earth, two types of organic matter.

For the late Cuban-American artist Mendieta, art was a way to “become one with the earth”. [to] become an extension of nature and nature become[ing] an extension of [her] body”, as much as it was a way to reconnect with Cuba, his native land. In her Silhouette (Silhouette) (1970s) series of photographs and Corazón de Roca con Sangre (Heart of rock with blood) (1975) video on view, Mendieta traces the outline of his figure on the earth – in rocks, mud, water, blood, and flowers, among other materials.

This communion between the human body and the land, as well as concerns of belonging and transformation, persist today in the work of Colectivo Ixqcrear, a Guatemalan collective created by Q’eqchi’ Mayan women and made up of sisters Ixmukane and Ixmayab’ Quib Caal and their aunt Elena Caal Hub. In their video La fuerza que emancipa al cuerpo (The force that emancipates the body) (2022), a woman sleeps in clay, personifying pepem ixq (butterfly woman), the spirit of all subjugated women. Pepem ixq is awakened by the voices of emancipated women and subsequently arises, dresses and meets the women who have supported it, an intergenerational group inspired by the mother and grandmother of the members of the collective, who survived gender-based and colonial violence.

In the text Mi abuela Juana (From my grandmother Juana) by indigenous artist Kaqchikel Maya Marilyn Boror Bor and writer Jimena Pons Ganddini, they similarly mark a generational sharing of knowledge, writing, “something in my grandmother’s gesture and the way the fire respects her makes me feel like… she was forged from earth and fire; that is why she wears maps on her skin because she is guide, memory and pure territory”.

Panamanian artist Risseth Yangüez Singh explores the notion of intergenerational cartography in Panamaafrica (2023), a textile work made in collaboration with her grandmother that shows the map of Panama. Created from braided hair and shells, the work marks places with African names and their derivations on the territory. The work is presented with the video performance Hacerme un capullo (Make me a cocoon) (2023), in which Singh, with the help of close friends, braids himself into a cocoon of hair as an act of communal, meditative healing using politicized organic material. The curators note the musical quality of this gesture, explaining that Singh “questions[s] her experience as a black woman, drawing new lines, like a partition in her hair”.

Inside the installation by Guatemalan artist Carolina Alvarado Comen poemas mojados en leche, uno dos tres gatos (They eat poets soaked in milk, one two three cats) (2023), the voices come forward. Working with women at Casa Refugiados, an organization that supports refugees in Mexico City, she built a white tree of branches with embroidered elements cascading down like roots. Inspired by a poem of the same name recited in Spanish, English, French and Quiché (the language of the Maya Kʼicheʼ), the work connects recent poetry with elements of the Maya worldview present in the Popol Vuh, the founding sacred text of the Kʼicheʼ people, to honor the memory of the writers and poets murdered during the Guatemalan civil war (1960-96). As much as Alvarado’s installation deals with the estrangement and violence that can be done to a body by state and society, it is guided by a belief in universal connectedness, a “rhythm” that the curators identify as setting the tone for the entire exhibition.

During an opening press conference, Birbragher-Rozencwaig and Canela presented their biennale as an invitation to discussion and celebration, a provocation supported by the inaugural ceremony organized by the Colectivo Tz’aqol. Led by Victor Manuel Barillas and Marta Guadalupe Tuyuc Us, the collective leads theater and healing workshops from the perspective of a Mayan worldview. Solik/Desatar (Solik/Attacher) (2022) is a monologue that chronicles the daily life of a young girl, her rape and the cycles of trauma that ensue. As a form of community healing, participants were asked to actively join in the ceremony and throw candles into a fire, join hands, lean on the backs of other participants and strangers, and finally dance. In this presentation, as in many other works in the XXIII Paiz Art Biennale, tactile and bodily gestures operate as languages ​​between and beyond words.

• XXIII Paiz Art Biennial, through July 30, various locations, Guatemala City and Antigua, Guatemala. Presentations at Centro Cultural de España and Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española in Guatemala City, and at La Nueva Fábrica in Antigua, will be open until September 30